Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Abstract from the June/July issue of Innovate: In the past, copyright and education have evolved together in response to technological advances from the book to the videocassette, and copyright law has been designed to allow educators to use a wide range of media with their students. Stephen Marshall describes how digital communication technologies threaten these accommodations, not as a direct consequence of the technology itself or even of copyright law but rather as a result of the growing prevalence of control technologies aimed at extracting profits from every conceivable use of information. Marshall argues for a rethinking of copyright in the face of Web 2.0 technologies that do not fit into traditional conceptualizations of copyright and suggests that, if educators do not speak up, copyright law will be taken over by corporate forces interested only in profit, to the detriment of educational uses of media.

Friday, March 28, 2008

EDUCAUSE has a podcast and has recently had an episode on recent updates in Copyright Law. Have a listen to the introduction here - http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/educauselivepodcastupdate/46505 - then fire up your iTunes and subscribe to the podcast.

I recently mentioned a court case where students sued Turn It In for copyright violation. The plagiarism prevention company allows professors to run papers through its database, where the paper is compared to thousands of other papers. Turn It In then adds the submitted paper to its database, complete with identifiable information like the student's name and the professor's name. It is this last step that is the reason for the lawsuit.

Students at Univ of Iowa are up in arms about the University's plan to publish student work on the web. The thing is, the information was publicly available before, just not on the web. The students argue, with some reason, that publishing the work on the web is different from making it available in the graduate office.

" Join the Center for Intellectual Property for its annual symposium exploring the relationship between the U.S. copyright monopoly, technological innovation and higher education institutions."http://www.umuc.edu/mkting/cip/index2.html